Return Shaker Aamer to the UK from Guantánamo: Major Publicity Campaign Launched to Secure 100,000 Signatures on UK E-Petition

This is the image that, from next week, will be on postcards distributed the length and breadth of the UK, and handed out in universities and colleges, in mosques and churches, and at protests and other gatherings, to secure 100,000 signatures on an e-petition launched by the family and lawyers of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo. Please click on the image for the full-size version.

Entitled, “Return Shaker Aamer to the UK,” the e-petition (which can be signed by children, as well as adults) urges the government — and, specifically, the Foreign Office and the foreign secretary William Hague — to “undertake urgent new initiatives to achieve the immediate transfer of Shaker Aamer to the UK from continuing indefinite detention in Guantánamo Bay.”

The e-petition needs 100,000 signatures by May 14 to secure a response from the British government, and in order to achieve this, campaigners are drawing up plans to repeat the successful campaign to secure a Parliamentary debate about Babar Ahmad, the British citizen who has been held in the UK without charge or trial for eight years pending extradition to the US. Nearly 150,000 signatures were secured for Babar Ahmad between August and November last year, triggering a debate in Parliament that facilitated high-level discussions about the fundamental problems regarding the extradition agreements between the US and the UK, and throughout the EU.

British resident Shaker Aamer has a British wife and four British children.
He has been held at Guantánamo for 10 years without charge or trial.
He is held even though the Bush administration cleared him for release in 2007, Obama reportedly cleared him in 2010, and the UK government has been requesting his release for five years.

Help us bring this injustice to an end. Please sign the e-petition to demand his release.

For now, however, let’s concentrate on publicising the e-petition via these excellent flyers, and getting as many signatures as possible to secure the release of Shaker Aamer from his unjustifiable ongoing detention in Guantánamo.

Reading looks forward to receiving the flyers! When we had the rally for shakers 10th anniversary the general public was sooooo supportive, am optimistic that if every town,city does their bit we can easily get this petition over 100,000.

Where it says “Please also feel free to download and print paper copies of the petition here, which can be used by campaigners collecting signatures in public” the link doesn’t work, everytime i click on it it says, This item might not exist or is no longer available. Is it working on your end?

Thanks, Issam. There is a petition in Kuwait, for the two remaining Kuwaiti prisoners, which already has over 20,000 signatures: http://www.aloulalaw.com/petition_en.htm
It’s also being backed by demands in the Kuwaiti Parliament, as I’ll be reporting soon.